Opening Ceremonies Complete. Beginning of the End has… begun.
No time to digest or even read whatever it said, the protection fully dropped as the message appeared. I slammed the door with my shoulder and it shuttered. I repeated it but the remnant pain of my shoulder wound disabused continuing down that path. The doorknob was fairly low on the door, it struck me as an old door. I slammed my foot right above the lock and heard it splinter, then again and again until it almost took me inside with it as the lock broke through the old wood. I pushed it open the rest of the way and turned to close it.
Standing there, I saw something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Illuminated by my shitty crank-flashlight, I saw a grossly oversized cat lift one paw and hook a single claw through the screen of the porch door and pull it open. Another, hulking cat and hugely muscled on top of that, took the screen door from the first cat’s paw and held it open like some off-brand celebrity security guard. Some real pinky and the brain shit, but I didn’t find it that funny.
The big shot sauntered in halfway to the porch then sat and we locked eyes, my hatchet/kukri’s hilt was already in my right hand, my revolver undrawn but my left hand steadily tightened around the grip.
Those two were freaky enough, but what really stuck with me, what really would stick with me, was that as far as my weak flashlight could reach, all I could see was a writhing, moving sea of cat and fur.
I didn’t like how it said that last word, like it was talking about some catatonic mouse that had trapped itself in a corner, its destiny to be toyed with before inevitable consumption.
“I, uh, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to just spend the night and then I’ll leave in the morning.”
The cat paused and tilted its head, almost cute if you forgot the fact that all cats are the same, except in size and the objective fact that their prey selection is based solely on that metric. In terms of total amount of flesh, I was severely outclassed by the horde of cats.
These cats seemed more reasonable than the wolves, but I wouldn’t trust them for a second. Presumably, this cat-farm had once been run by a person, if so, where were they?
“Yes, I was fighting against wolves, wild-dogs essentially, and after I killed a bunch of them I had access to this Skill.”
“Apologies.”
“Yeah, you’re totally right. You know us humans, we hardly know our behinds from our heads.”
Okay Tom, you don’t have to suck quite so much ass here.
Dark chuckles came from the surrounding cats, their waify-attention was being pulled toward the novelty of a ‘human that was smart enough to properly speak a more refined tongue’. None of them said as much, or in so many words, but that was the gist.
I had a sinking feeling, I was definitely starting to feel like the mouse in this interaction.
“What’s unfortunate?”
I didn’t turn my head toward the semi-broken door, “Ah yeah, I can totally fix that.”
“It is quite dark right now, do you know where I can find the supplies to fix it?”
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My hands tensed.
It brought a paw up to its chin in an unsettling Human motion,
Fuck. No.
“On second thought, Sir Cat-”
I drew my revolver and blasted out three or four shots. I didn’t pay attention to the number or even really where they went as I slammed the door shut and slammed my shoulder against it. Fuck those cats, they weren’t planning on letting me go. The mouse analogy was right, they were toying with me. There was also the bit of surprise that the cats were hip with gender-identity, likely something learned from the previous owner of a ‘cat-farm’, not that any of it would change the fact that I’d gladly murder whichever cat wanted to fucking try me. I knew those shits were up to something, I would have been stripped to the bone had I followed them anywhere. I scanned my fading light across the interior of the farmhouse. “Okay. Order of operat-” Most doors on the interior had small ‘kitty doors’, so I looked at the base of the exterior door. There was a kitty door there too. And it was softly swinging. I flashed my light down and saw a black cat. I viciously stomped it. The air stilled as it died under my foot. From each room and doorway that I could see, there were cats, doing their slow, lithe, runway walk through them. “Shit.” Before it finished ‘rude’ I was running, stomping hard and kicking my way through the horde. They showed a typical feline mercy in response, also known as ‘none’. Claws peeled at my clothing and tore into my skin and I swung my blade, reaping cat-life through desperation and basic surface area constants more than skill. I could barely hear myself think between all the leaping, flying fur and the yowls and hissing. It seemed like more were coming in, there probably were. My packs held off the worst of the attacks to my chest and likely kept me from already being disemboweled. I knew that if I stopped moving I would be dead soon after. I beat a pace up the stairs, taking them two at a time, I fell at the top and heard two cats that had been working their way up my bag screech as their backs were broken underneath me. I stomped through them swinging as I blocked my face with my left hand, the one holding the pistol, as I tried to find… something. There, a door with no cat-door. I ran through, cats hanging off me like a bad fur coat and aimed my good shoulder toward it as I hit it at full-speed. The door ripped off its hinges but all I felt was the gross squish of furred flesh. I almost gagged before capitalizing, slamming the door up as I kicked downed and stunned cats away from me. I dropped my pistol and ripped the especially persistent felines off of me. There, old heavy wood, a dresser. I let go of the door and ran over to it and pushed. Freakish strength moved it, but not quick enough, a new storm of cats pushed the door open and started to flow in. A half-second later, the dresser was close enough. I ripped the door upward and roughly slammed it into its place. A few cats found the manic severity in which I slammed it up and closed to be unfortunate to their long-term survival. I slammed the dresser over in a violent shove to barricade it. I saw the door shake but it stayed closed. I ripped off a few of the last immediate attackers and slammed them into the floor, the dresser, anything hard that was nearby. I put my back to the wall and started to laugh. It caught in my throat as there, sitting primly and in perfect silence, scattered around the room, were 20 of the damned things. A few of them finished some mid-fight grooming as they stopped licking themselves and I found myself in a stare-off with a whole mess of the damned things. I’d be creeped out even if it was under normal conditions. I can’t believe I'd actually given my word to come here with Casey. I searched for my revolver but two cats were batting it away from me into a corner of the room. I scanned the room and what I would have to work with as I unfolded a small camping knife for my left hand, it clicked-and-locked open and I held it tightly in a backwards grip. I tightened my right hand around my blade-kukri-whatever. “I’m assuming there’s no way to talk this out?” The cats wordlessly hissed as one, presumably in agreement. ---------------------------------------- Holy shit, holyshit. I’m alive. I’M ALIVE. This time, my eyes roamed every dark corner of the room, making sure it was empty, before I let out an exhausted laugh, feeling myself alive and now that I took another moment, in great pain. I moved to sit up and it took a few tries, the cat wounds burned something fierce and there weren’t a few of them. Around me… I’d seen some nasty shit on an ambulance before. Shit and blood mixed in unfortunate ratios and quantities, the cursed eldrich flower of suicide by shotgun, and other… things that even now, I didn’t care to dredge up. Regardless, this was the most extreme by far. And by ‘most extreme’ I mean most fucked up. Cat corpses absolutely littered the room. Unpleasant quantities of blood, viscera, and even waste. Nearly everything that could be broken, was. The bed was shredded, where 8 or so cats had coordinated their pounce into my back and drove me face first onto it. That was a close one. If my backpack hadn’t been full and strapped tightly, that would have been it for me. I looked at the desk that had bursts of cat blood in violent splashes running across it and up the wall, my own blood well-mixed in more than a few spots around the room alongside it. My eyes drifted past the closet, where I had juked a hand-full of cats into and then slammed shut behind them. That was a spur of the moment thing that had paid off as it bought me time to finish off a particularly large and nasty maine-coon, its long fur provided decent protection against anything that wasn’t a direct hit. Ducky would have lost her mind at this, I legitimately thanked God that she had been taken away. It would have broken her heart to have had to visit this much violence on her eagerly-anticipated cat farm. To be honest, if she had been here and I had to protect her, we would have both been dead. I felt a burst of strength at some point in the fight, but I was unsure if that was because of some Feat or if I had just discovered some third-wind in the middle of the fight. There were a few points during it where I knew I could have let a wave burst from me, but had I stopped myself. I needed the will to fight and while it had been a desperate thing, I hadn’t been desperate enough to potentially cripple my willingness to survive in the middle of the melee. I panicked for a moment as I stood still, then looked around. The huge one, probably. I recranked my light and took a fresh look around, this time ignoring the cat’s words.